As Canadians, our patriotism is usually humbly brandished, so it’s nice to see us let loose every once in awhile.  I was fortunate enough to be watching when we achieved both our first gold on home turf and our final and record-breaking fourteenth, and it would be impossible for any Canadian to not be swept up by the enthusiasm displayed by thousands of fans celebrating in the streets day and night.  Congrats to all of the athletes — you’ve made us proud.

[Above drawing done in PaintTool SAI.  The character is Canada (aka Matthew Williams), from Himaruya Hidekazu's (very amusing) historical allegory Axis Powers Hetalia.]

Some unfortunate news this morning: Mr. P, the Phainopepla that has been hanging around Brampton since November, finally succumbed to the scarcity brought on by our harsh northern climate.  Sightings had become very infrequent, and finally late last week he was spotted low in a bush, struggling to harvest rose hips before falling to the ground.  He was taken to a songbird rehabilitation center, where he was eating well and seemed to be recovering, but sadly did not make it in the end.

Sketch done in PaintTool SAI.

I wish traditional media had layers.  And an undo button.  The entire process is much less frustrating this way.

Aside from isolating different areas of the artwork for each stage of the process, layers also double as progress snapshots.  The click of a button can peel back each stage all the way to the original rough sketch:

Second layer — the line art:

I drew this one up specifically to play around with Manga Studio’s colour tools.  I had to hunt down a few tutorials for this — layers and palettes are in greyscale mode by default, and it took me awhile to figure out why I couldn’t lay any colours down.  The dodge and burn tools were also hidden away, but I eventually found them in a submenu on the toolbox.  Once I got myself set up, the tools were easy enough to use (though I still have a lot to learn about digitally colouring line art, I think).

The final version, dressed up with with a Sagan quote.  I have some slightly more ambitious science-related illustration stuff in the queue.  This was a fun warmup.

Well, not entirely new.  I’d been eyeing one of these little budget Wacom tablets for awhile, with the intent of using it for some illustration projects that have been bumping around in my head over the past year.  When Amazon dropped the price below $100 back in August, I couldn’t find a good reason to resist any longer and ordered one.  It’s sat in my laptop bag mostly unused since then, but now that winter is here and I’ve been too busy during the limited daylight hours to do much (any) field sketching, I’ve been sating my artistic urges by playing around with some digital ink.  I’ve never used a tablet before, and it takes some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

The device ships with Corel Painter Essentials 4 and Photoshop Elements 6.0, which by themselves would have covered the $100 price tag.  I used the latter for the above colour sketch.  The line work looks a bit rough here — freehanding smooth lines with a tablet takes some practice, and I have unsteady hands to begin with.  Unfortunately Elements lacks line correction or bezier pen tools — for that you need to upgrade to the full Photoshop CS4 or find yourself a copy of Illustrator (not chump change) — so I started playing around with a trial version of Manga Studio instead.  It’s awesome.  I love this app.

I did the above character sketch with Manga Studio Debut 4.  As the name indicates, this is comic software, and as such is well tailored to black and white line work.  My Christmas gift to myself was a copy of the EX version, and I spent a lazy Christmas day out at my folks’ place noodling around with it.  The tools are pretty easy to use, though I find the documentation a bit haphazard in its organization, so it’s taking some time to go through it.  Here’s the result of yesterday’s fooling around — I thought it appropriate to do something wintery (despite the mildness and steady rain we had to put up will all day).  Still trying to figure out the settings on the fill tool, so some of the toning was done by hand.

Fun!